Venice is sinking very slowly -only about two inches every 100 years. But worse, the Adriatic sea is rising around Venice as well. A proposed plan to save the Italian city involves "inflating" its porous foundation with sea water to raise the whole town about a foot. Forty billion gallons of water would need to be pumped! Read more about the plan at National Geographic News. Link-Thanks, Marilyn!

Back when the Getty Museum was sitting on over $1 billion in money, some of which had to be spent every year by law, I sent a letter to them suggesting that they could fund a project much like this. My thought was to go deeper and inject concrete. In this way they could use the money as intended, saving important art, and they were the only ones at the time that might have both the cash and the interest. They declined.